Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [197]
Ommun pulled on the ropes and hooks, guiding the worm. “Haiiii-Yoh!” The huge sinuous creature raced across the sands, heading south. . . .
Kynes rode all that day, with the dry, dusty wind blowing in his face and sunlight reflecting off the sands. He had no way of estimating the speed at which the worm cruised, but he knew it must be astonishing.
As the hot breezes whipped around him, he could smell freshets of oxygen and the flinty burned-stone odors of the worm’s passage. In the absence of extensive plant cover on Dune, the Planetologist realized the worms themselves must generate much of the atmospheric oxygen.
It was all Kynes could do to hold on to his palanquin. He had no way to access his notes and records in the pack on his back. What a magnificent report this would make—though he knew in his heart he could never give such information to the Emperor. No one but the Fremen knew this secret, and it must remain that way. We are actually riding a worm! He had other obligations now, new and far more important allegiances.
Centuries earlier, the Imperium had placed biological testing stations at strategic points on the surface of Dune, but such facilities had fallen into disrepair. In recent months Kynes had been reopening them, using a few Imperial troops assigned to the planet just to maintain appearances; for the most part, though, he staffed them with his own Fremen. He was amazed at the ability of his sietch brothers to infiltrate the system, find things for themselves, and employ technology. They were a marvelously adaptable breed—and adapting was the only way to survive on a place like Dune.
Under Kynes’s direction the Fremen workers stripped equipment from the isolated biological stations, took necessary items back to their sietches, and filled out paperwork to report the pieces as lost or damaged; the oblivious Imperium then replaced the losses with new instruments so that the station monitors could continue their work. . . .
After hours of rapid travel across the Great Flat, the enormous worm became sluggish, exhibiting obvious fatigue, and Ommun had difficulty exerting control. The worm showed signs of wanting to bury itself beneath the sand, increasingly willing to risk abrading its sensitive, exposed tissue.
Finally Ommun brought the behemoth around until it ground to a halt, exhausted. The troop of desert men dropped off while Kynes slid down the rough worm segments onto loose sand. Ommun tossed down the remaining packs and dismounted, letting the worm—too utterly tired to turn and attack them—wallow its way into the sands. The Fremen removed the hooks so the worm, their Shai-Hulud, could recover.
The men sprinted to a line of rock, where there would be caves and shelter, and—Kynes was surprised to see—a small sietch that welcomed them for the night with food and conversation. Word of the Planetologist’s dream had spread to all the secret places across Dune, and the sietch leader there told them it was his great honor to host Umma Kynes.
The next day the group set off again on another sandworm, and another. Kynes soon gained a more complete understanding of what Stilgar had meant with his assessment of a “twenty-thumper” journey.
The wind was fresh, and the sand was bright, and the Fremen took enormous pleasure in their grand adventure. Kynes sat atop his palanquin like an emperor himself, looking out over the desertscape. For him the dunes were endlessly fascinating, and yet strangely the same at so many latitudes.
Near Heinar’s sietch a month earlier, Kynes had flown alone in his small Imperial ornithopter, exploring aimlessly. He had been blown off course by a small storm. He’d held control, even against the gusting winds, but he had been awestruck to look down upon the open sands where the storm had scoured clean a flat white basin—a salt pan.
Kynes had seen such things before, but never here on Dune. The geological formation looked like a white mirrored oval, marking the boundaries of what had once